So my homebrew fantasy system is still simmering away, but I thought of an interesting way to handle DR.

Instead of flatly reducing damage, you could drop the highest die for each face at/under your DR (so if you have DR2 and your enemy rolls 2,4, and 5 the total would be 6). So the maximum damage could stay high while the curve skews lower.

My problem is with calculating the odds on this in any real detail. I have brute forced calculations on a few setups, with interesting results. But 3 dice gets tedious and 7 will be absurd. Ultimately I need pretty detailed info on many combinations of damage/DR formulas.

I found a dice calculator that might be able to handle it here. But I can't quite figure out how to phrase things using the guide. Is anyone here able to make heads or tails of this?

It's a novel and mathematically interesting mechanic, but I gotta say, it seems a little complicated, like using a precision surgical laser to slice a piece of bread. Admittedly, though, this is my reaction to a lot of different mechanical systems/subsystems, so take my comment with a gigantic grain of salt.

sparkletwist

Very nearly so. It's understanding the function, and would work for random rolls, but the graph is a bit odd. I've attached both what I got the first time and what I got with the only edit I could fumble out.

Steerpike

It's a novel and mathematically interesting mechanic, but I gotta say, it seems a little complicated, like using a precision surgical laser to slice a piece of bread. Admittedly, though, this is my reaction to a lot of different mechanical systems/subsystems, so take my comment with a gigantic grain of salt.

It's a trade off for sure, but I am keeping my design goals in sight. Game takes a lot from both the swingy and lethal subgenre (RQ, WFRP) and from the resources and levels approach (D&D, 4e in particular) so there's this weird balancing act with damage. My target is actually pretty narrow and distant, hence the lasers.

beejazz

Very nearly so. It's understanding the function, and would work for random rolls, but the graph is a bit odd. I've attached both what I got the first time and what I got with the only edit I could fumble out.

The graph the way I gave it to you shows each possible outcome of the dice and what sum that gives you. I assume what you are looking for is just the probability of each sum coming up. You can get that if you leave out the first part of the formula and the separators, so you end up with:

sparkletwist

The graph the way I gave it to you shows each possible outcome of the dice and what sum that gives you. I assume what you are looking for is just the probability of each sum coming up. You can get that if you leave out the first part of the formula and the separators, so you end up with:

Code:

DR := 2; roll := 3d6;

keeps := count DR < roll; sum least keeps roll

Excellent! And the results are almost exactly what I hoped they would be too. Thank you!